A Study Of The Changing Trends Of English-major Postgraduates’ Critical Thinking

As one of the training objectives of modern education,critical thinking has aroused wide concern abroad and at home in recent years.It has been widely accepted by scholars at home that foreign language students were lacking of the ability of critical thinking.To solve this problem,a lot of researches have been conducted.However,these researches mainly focus on English-major undergraduates,few studies targeting English-major postgraduates.The necessity and importance of cultivating postgraduates’ critical thinking has been widely acknowledged.To foster postgraduates’ critical thinking,relevant studies at home mainly explore cultivating methods from a macroscopic perspective,few studies paying attention to the cultivation of postgraduates’ critical thinking ability in a specific subject.In addition,these studies mainly discuss training methods at theoretical level,lacking empirical support.There are seldom studies concerning English-major postgraduates’ critical thinking,most of which attempts to find concrete cultivating methods in a specific course by practice research.Studies exploring cultivating methods from the perspective of the overall English-major postgraduate education is still a blank to be filled.To make up for the above deficiencies,this thesis aims to provide pertinent suggestions from the teaching perspective to facilitate the cultivation of English-major postgraduates’ critical thinking by measuring the critical thinking ability of students from different grades,presenting the changing trends of English-major postgraduates’ critical thinking with the increase of grades and exploring the reasons behind the trends.This study will take English-major postgraduates from a normal university in Shandong Province as subjects.The 85 academic postgraduates are from three grades and the 97 professional postgraduates from two grades.The entrance scores for English-major postgraduates every year are almost consistent and there is no significant difference among students from different grades.Firstly,Critical Thinking Skills Test and Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory will be adopted as research instruments to collect data.Critical Thinking Skills Test targets English-major postgraduates’ skills of analysis,evaluation and inference,and Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory targets their dispositions of truth-seeking,open-mindedness,analyticity,systematicity,self-confidence inquisitiveness and maturity.Then,the quantitative data of questionnaires will be analyzed by SPSS 20,mainly adopting Descriptive Statistics,Independent-Samples T-test and one-way Analysis of Variance.Afterwards,based on the research results 10 students will be randomly selected to be interviewed.The interviews are semi-structured.After the interviews,the qualitative data collected will be analyzed then in order to supplement the quantitative data collected by the questionnaires.The results are presented as follows:(1)Academic English-major postgraduates’ critical thinking skills present a rising trend with the increase of grades.There exists significant difference among three grades.The mean difference between students in Grade one and students in Grade two is larger than that between students in Grade two and students in Grade three.However,there is no significant difference between students from any two grades.The results indicate that academic English-major postgraduates’ critical thinking skills improve significantly with the increase of grades.After one year’s study,students in Grade two make greater progress than students in Grade three.However,there is no critical period of the development of critical thinking throughout three years’ study.In terms of the three sub-skills,academic English-major postgraduates’ skills of analysis,evaluation and inference present a rising tendency with the increase of grades.Comparing students from different grades,the author of this thesis find that there only exists significant difference between Grade one and Grade three on the scale of inference,indicating that students’ skill of inference improve significantly after three years’ study.(2)Professional English-major postgraduates’ critical thinking skills present a rising trend with the increase of grades.There is no significant difference between two grades in terms of the overall critical thinking skills as well as the three sub-scales.The research results indicate that professional English-major postgraduates’ critical thinking skills improve after two years’ study,but such improvement is not significant.(3)Academic English-major postgraduates’ critical thinking dispositions present a “V-type”changing trends with the increase of grades.As for the seven dimensions,open-mindedness and maturity present a “V-type” trend;analyticity and self-confidence present an “inverted V-type”trend;truth-seeking and systematicity present an increasing trend,and inquisitiveness presents a downward trend.There is no significant difference between any two grades in terms of the overall critical thinking skills and the seven dimensions,indicating that the influence of the three years’ postgraduate education on the development of students’ critical thinking dispositions is not significant.(4)Professional English-major postgraduates’ critical thinking dispositions present a downward tendency with the increase of grades.As for the seven dimensions,truth-seeking,analyticity,systematicity,self-confidence and inquisitiveness present a decreasing trend,while open-mindedness and maturity present a rising trend.There is no significant difference between two grades in terms of the overall critical thinking skills and the seven dimensions,indicating that professional postgraduates’ critical thinking dispositions decline slightly after two years’ study.Based on the research results,this thesis provides suggestions from the perspective ofteaching method,curriculum setting,the relationship between teachers and students,assessment method and thesis writing in order to promote the development of English-major postgraduates’ critical thinking ability.However,this study also has some limitations: the subjects are from one single university;the research subjects are not the same group of students;students’ critical thinking ability at the beginning of Grade one is not tested.Further studies could make up these limitations so as to investigate more deeply and comprehensively.